Midwest Mahjar: The Recorded Sounds of the Arabic-Speaking Diaspora in the United States at 78 RPM

  Ronnie Kirby: Boston Metro’s Go to Derbake Player Ronnie Kirby. From the back cover of  Anton Abdelahad's  Middle East Fantasy  LP. Courtesy of Richard Breaux collection.   At Midwest Mahjar we have been blogging about Arab American music for almost five years and we have featured very few percussionists, especially, derbake, doumbek, or drum players. The most well-known drummers to come to mind were Mike Hamway and Eddie Kochak . Anne K. Rassmussen’s work reveals that mahrajan and hafla organizers paid drummers or derbake players least of all. Yet the rhythmic, pulsating, thump of the derbake became a mainstay in the post-acoustic, electrical recording era Arab American music. During the early years of the mahrajan and hafla circuit, members of a traveling singer’s ensemble might come from a local community; however, over the years singers like Hanan and Tony Abdelahad demanded their own ensembles and accompanists travel along with them on the mahrajan cir...

  Lila Stephan: The Beginnings of the Next Generation from 78 to 33 rpm Lila Stephan, The Caravan 13 October 1957. Courtesy of Newpapers.com In 1952, the United States lifted its restriction on naturalized citizenship. Previous to this time, only those people classified as racially white had a path toward naturalized citizenship. Arab American music was four decades old and only a handful of the earliest Arab American musicians remained actively connected to the music industry. Historians of Arab immigration to the United States consider 1952 as a year within the second waves of Arab immigrants which spanned from 1944 to 1965. On 25 February 1952, three adolescents left Beirut en route to the United States. Although they arrived in New York, the oldest of the three, 15-year-old Suham, listed 1662 Washington Street in Boston as their future home. According to immigration documents, the youngest of the trio, Lila, was fourteen. There is no evidence that Lila expressed the slightest ...